Toni Morrison 1993 Nobel Prize
Mario Roby
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Toni Morrison became a novelist for the ages when she was awarded the 1993 Nobel Prize for literature. The eighth woman and the first black American to win the prize, Morrison expressed surprise and delight at receiving the honor and displayed an impetuous generosity:
Morrison's image of herself as a literary organism whose creative force is fed by all that has encompassed her is reflected in her fiction, a combination of prose and poetry so lyrical and evocative that it often transcends the narrative of African-Americans that she presents, exhorting all her readers to share in and accept responsibility for the creative act they are witnessing. In her Nobel Prize acceptance speech Morrison told a story in which the roles of storyteller and listener eventually elide one another so that both are involved in fiction making. "How lovely it is," the storyteller concludes, "this thing we have done -- together."
In describing Morrison's work the Nobel Committee of the Swedish Academy stated: "She delves into the language itself, a language she wants to liberate from the fetters of race. And she addresses us with the luster of poetry." For Morrison it is the language that, as she said in her acceptance speech, "may be the measure of our lives," and as such it must not be a language that oppresses or manipulates, "the policing languages of mastery," but that can "limn the actual, imagined and possible lives of its speaker, readers, writers." It must be free of the arrogance of absolute definition. "Its force, its felicity is in its reach toward the ineffable." In 1996 Morrison received the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, and in her acceptance speech, The Dancing Mind, she continues to emphasize the necessary interconnectedness--the dancing of minds--that occurs through reading and writing. The reader she speaks of must come to terms with solitude, and the writer she met risked her life in an attempt to put words beyond the control of a stifling government. Writing, Morrison says, is thus
a craft that appears solitary but needs another for its completion. A craft that signals independence but relies totally on an industry. It is more than an urge to make sense or to make sense artfully or to believe it matters. It is more than a desire to watch other writers manage to refigure the world. I know now, more than I ever did (and I always on some level knew it), that I need that intimate, sustained surrender to the company of my mind while it touches another's--which is reading . . . That I need to offer the fruits of my own imaginative intelligence to another without fear of anything more deadly than disdain--which is writing.
Morrison has become one of the literary elite even though, since she is an African-American and a female, her writings are often a challenge to the canon of predominantly white-male American writing. Morrison's remarkable accomplishment is summed up by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.: "Just two centuries ago, the African-American literary tradition was born in slave narratives. Now our greatest writer has won the Nobel Prize." The fact that Morrison has received the most prestigious of writing awards serves not only to expand the literary criteria for greatness but has also initiated discussion about the evolving nature of American literature. Evidence of the high level of scholarly interest in Morrison's work includes the Toni Morrison Society Newsletter, a semiannual publication begun in 1995.
Morrison was born Chloe Ardelia Wofford in Lorain, Ohio, the second of four children raised in a family that had endured economic and social adversity. Morrison's maternal grandparents, Ardelia and John Solomon Willis, were sharecroppers in Greenville, Alabama, having lost their land at the turn of the century. In 1912 her grandparents decided to head north to escape the hopeless debt of sharecropping and the fear of racism, which posed the threat of sexual violation to their pubescent daughters. They traveled to Kentucky, where Morrison's grandfather worked in a coal mine and her mother was a laundress. But they left abruptly when their daughters came home from school one day, having taught the white teacher how to do long division. In search of a better education for their children, Morrison's grandparents eventually settled in Lorain.
While growing up during the Depression, Morrison witnessed the struggles of her father, George Wofford, who had migrated from Georgia, and mother, Ramah Willis Wofford, to support their family. George Wofford often worked many jobs at a time -- a shipyard welder, car washer, steelmill welder, and construction worker -- while Ramah Wofford, Morrison revealed in a 1983 interview with Nellie McKay (reprinted in Conversations with Toni Morrison, 1984), "took 'humiliating jobs' in order to send Morrison money regularly while she was in college and graduate school." Her parents' willingness to take on hard and sometimes demeaning work was coupled with a distinct unwillingness to relinquish their own sense of value and humanity. Morrison's father was meticulous in his work, writing his name in the side of the ship whenever he welded a perfect seam. Her mother at one point wrote a letter of protest to President Franklin D. Roosevelt when her family received unfit government-sponsored flour.
While Morrison's parents grappled with economic hardship, they also struggled to retain their sense of worth in an oppressive white world. Their early experiences with racism shaped their respective views of white people. Morrison's father was, in her words, a racist; she told Jean Strouse that, as a child in Georgia, he received "shocking impressions of adult white people." Morrison's mother held out hope for the white race to improve, but her father was convinced that whites were never to be trusted or believed. He once threw a white man out of his home, believing the visitor planned to molest his daughters. Both parents had reservations about the potential for the white race and thus taught their children to rely on themselves and the black community rather than the vagaries of a larger society whose worth to them was highly suspect.
Morrison did not suffer the effects of racism early on because she was the only black in her first-grade class and the only one who could read. However, she told Bonnie Angelo that her innocence was soon shattered:
Morrison confronted other incidents of racism, but her parents' emphasis on the value of African-Americans as a people, of their family as an inviolable unit, and of themselves as individuals was no doubt the psychological foundation that sustained and nurtured her. Her father was convinced that blacks were superior to whites, a belief that deeply influenced Morrison. At age thirteen, when she complained about the mean white family whose house she cleaned, her father told her she did not live with them, but "here. So you go do your work, get your money and come on home." Morrison did not adopt her father's racism, but she always knew, she remarked in an interview with Charlie Rose (Public Broadcasting System, 7 May 1993), "I had the moral high ground all my life."
Though deprived of monetary resources in a hostile world, Morrison's family and community held a remarkable wealth of music, storytelling, the supernatural, and black language -- major influences on Morrison and her writings. Morrison woke up to the sound of her mother's voice, singing both at home and for the church choir. But music, Morrison said in the Rose interview, "was not entertainment for us" but more a means of detecting her mother's moods. It acted as a support system. Though her family could not read music, they could reproduce the music they heard. Other forms of support included storytelling that involved every member of the family. After adults told stories, they invited the children to do the same. Morrison considered this part as important, if not more important, than listening to the stories.
Though there were few books in her house, Morrison learned early the importance of reading. Her grandfather was a figure of awe and respect to her because, with the help of his sister, he had taught himself to read. Morrison was encouraged to read and did so voraciously, including a wide range of world literature. She told Strouse:
Though Morrison did not read literature by black women writers until adulthood, she told Gloria Naylor in a 1985 interview (reprinted in Conversations with Toni Morrison) that her affinity with them, which critics have identified, is evidence that "the world as perceived by black women at certain times does exist."
That world was often rife with the supernatural. In a 1977 interview reprinted in Conversations with Toni Morrison, when asked by Mel Watkins whether she believed in ghosts, Morrison replied, "Yes. Do you believe in germs? It's part of our heritage." Morrison stated that her family was "intimate with the supernatural," her parents often telling exciting and terrifying ghost stories that the children were encouraged to repeat. Dreams were a constituent of reality -- her grandmother even played the numbers with the use of a dream book -- and ghostly apparitions were not considered astonishing. Without the belief in the supernatural, Morrison remarked to Valerie Smith, "I would have been dependent on so-called scientific data to explain hopelessly unscientific things and also I would have relied on information that even subsequent objectivity has proved to be fraudulent." Her novels, too, would have been bereft of their unique blend of fantasy and reality, myth and history, folklore and legend. So intertwined are the supernatural and empirical reality in Morrison's novels that the seen and the unseen often elide one another.
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